As announced in last month’s update, the DMPTool partners were awarded $590,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for further development of the DMPTool. Specifically, the grant will fund enhancements and extensions to the current functionality, including these items:

Promote the practice of data management, sharing, and preservation, emphasizing the utility of best practices beyond meeting funder requirements

Enable institutions to easily shape and exploit the DMPTool to meet local need

Foster the emergence of an engaged open source community of DMPTool users and developers

Maintain transparency in all project activities to facilitate community involvement

Increase the depth and breadth of the tool’s coverage for funder and institutional data management requirements

Enable collaboration and connect stakeholders to each other and institutional resources, including services, expertise and guidance

Provide support for the full data management life cycle, including provision for collaborative plan authorship, and review and reporting by institutional administrators

There were 307 data management plans created in January 2013, the second highest month so far. We also had 349 new users, bringing the total to over 4300.

The DMPTool experienced an outage on Saturday January 12 through Monday morning, January 14. There was a scheduled maintenance on Saturday January 12 and Sunday January 13 that took longer than expected. On Sunday evening, there was a problem with CDL’s high availability management software (VCS), causing most CDL services to be unavailable. The data management plans stored by the DMPTool were never affected, but access was not possible during this time. The problem was resolved on Monday morning, January 14.

Contributing Organizations
3 more universities configured their Shibboleth identity providers for the DMPTool in January, bringing the total to 72. 1 university added customizations, bringing the total number of partner institutions to 80. There are participating organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia; California leads all states with 18 participating organizations. A map of all participating organizations is available here: http://bit.ly/L85sKj.

DMPTool Service Description
The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool) provides an easy to use interface that: